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Save Money, Minimize Waste and Avoid Fees with RailBoss® Railroad Track Scales
Using a pitless rail scale for checkweighing rail cars, tracking product inventory, verifying safe loads and performing non-commercial filling operations can be a great way for your operation to increase the bottom line.
Non-Legal for Trade rail scales can usually be installed in as little as one day, and because most don’t require a concrete foundation or reconstruction, systems are installed at a fraction of the cost of traditional foundation scales—saving you money upfront.
Long-term Savings and Minimizing Waste
Without a railway track scale, many operations that move product in rail cars tend to underload by at least 5 percent to stay within safe load limits. But underloading by just 5 percent adds up quickly. In the span of filling 20 rail cars to 95 percent of the legal safe load limit, you’ll accumulate the empty, wasted space of an entire rail car! That’s like paying for the shipping of an empty rail car (about $4,000) every 20 cars you send down the track.
A railroad track scale helps you reduce this wasted space by checkweighing every rail car to make sure it’s full to the safe load limit. If you are debating if the cost of a non-Legal for Trade railway track scale is in the budget, ask yourself: How many rail cars do I ship in a year? If you ship 5,000 cars annually at 95 percent full, you could be saving one million dollars in shipping costs from underloaded cars!
Avoid Overloaded and Unbalanced Fines
Overloading your rail cars, or filling them unbalanced, can be just as costly as underloading. If just one of your overloaded rail cars is flagged, you could be looking at upwards of $10,000 in fines. You’ll also need to pay fees to have your rail car taken off the main line at the nearest rail siding and have a labor crew remove the excess material from the car.
The same fines and fees apply to unbalanced and unsafe loads. Even if your rail car is under the legal load limit, if the contents are loaded in a way that could cause the rail car to derail or present hazards, it could be removed from the line and taken to a siding until the load is redistributed to a safe level.
Verify Incoming Product Weights
From an inbound perspective, a non-Legal for Trade railroad track scale can verify the product you are receiving does in fact weigh what you ordered. You can use that weight readout to track inventory and incorporate it into your future purchasing decisions. At just 25 percent of the cost of a traditional concrete foundation railway track scale, a non-Legal for Trade checkweighing rail car scale makes sense every way you look at it.
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RailBoss® Rail Scale
Rice Lake's non-Legal for Trade RailBoss rail scale is less than one-third the cost of other rail scales and typically takes less than eight hours to install.